KDL Recommends

Swedish Mysteries

Frozen Tracks by Ake Edwardson

For Detective Chief Inspector Erik Winter, the days seem even shorter and the nights bleaker when he is faced with two apparently unrelated sets of perplexing crimes. Mysterious assaults on college students in Gothenburg’s parks are carried out in the dark of the night, while during the day toddlers are abducted from their nursery schools and quickly returned, seemingly unharmed, before anyone even notices they are missing.

Erica Falck returns home to sort through her deceased parents’ belongings and work on her next book. But this is not the same hometown she grew up in. Upon finding out about a close friend’s suicide she decides to write her next book about the death while skillfully detailing how horrific secrets are never be completely buried and how silence can kill the soul.

Combine the chilly Swedish backdrop and moody psychodrama of a Bergman movie with the grisly pyrotechnics of a serial-killer thriller, then add an angry punk heroine and a down-on-his-luck investigative journalist, and you have the ingredients of Stieg Larsson’s first novel, all coming together to make this novel more than your run-of-the-mill mystery.

A devastating mistake drove Fredrik Welkin into a life as far as possible from his former position as a surgeon, where he mistakenly amputated the wrong arm of one of his patients. Now he lives in a frozen landscape. Each morning he dips his body into the freezing lake surrounding his home to remind himself he’s alive.

Van Veeteren and his associates are left bewildered by the curious murder of a man shot twice in the heart and twice below the belt. An utterly dull man, the only suspicious activity his surviving wife can report is a series of peculiar phone calls. Repeatedly the telephone would ring, offering no answer but an obscure pop song from the 1960s. This siren song would be linked to an identical murder, but the true connection remains unknown.

Beginning with the death of an unknown American citizen in Stockholm, the story slowly unravels into a complex web of international espionage, greed, sheer incompetence, and work by a poorly constructed Swedish intelligence force that in this fiction lead to the murder of the prime minister.

Piet Hoffman, a top secret operative for the Swedish police, is about to embark on his most dangerous assignment yet: after years spent infiltrating the Polish mafia, he’s become a key player in their attempt to take over amphetamine distribution inside Sweden’s prisons. To stop them from succeeding, he will have to go deep cover, posing as a prisoner inside the country’s most notorious jail.

After Deputy Inspector Irene Huss and her team find a divorced teacher shot to death in his isolated cottage, his computer monitor marked with a bloody Satanic symbol, they visit his parents only to find them dead as well and with the same markings on their computer. The data on both machines was erased professionally, and the only viable lead, Jacob’s London-based sister, is too devastated by the dual tragedy to offer much assistance.